Sketchbook Secrets: 50 Beautiful Sketchbook Scans

The sketchbook is—to borrow a term from the new millenniums’ popular discourse—an artist’s BFF. It’s a diary for the visually inclined—a place where artists can most comfortably explore their personal thoughts, work out their visual needs, practice, maintain a visual history, and hopefully create the unpolished work that will eventually lead to amazing work for the world to see.

But, sometimes, when we’re lucky, we get to see the process. Below are 50 beautiful sketchbook scans from 35 talented artists.

Shane Ward is a Contributing Editor of Groundwave Media Group (a Toronto-based web publishing company), which includes sites such as Freshbump—a social news site that provides daily visual inspiration to its readers, Collect3d (about designer toys) and Format Magazine (about urban art and fashion).

Just a quick question for people: Did this web page load too slow for you? We’re currently evaluating our infrastructure to make sure that we’re able to serve you these huge web pages without too much waiting. If this page loaded too slow for you (compared to other sites that you visit) or if you experienced any issues with the images not loading, please let us know.

Hi Jacob,
Using FF 3.6 it did take longer than I normally expect for your site. Probably around 8-10 seconds. Cool collection of many different styles of sketching. I appreciate your posts for inspiration.

When I checked it from home last night it didn’t seem like it loaded slow. However when I checked the thread just now it took a little longer for the images to come up while on my work network. I’m more then likely going to chalk it up to the ghetto network I am on at the office.

A question: Did it load extraordinarily slow compared to other websites that you visit? There are a ton of images here, but do you still feel that it should load faster? Of course, it should load as fast as possible, but there’s understandably some waiting time for heavy web pages (this one’s 3.93 MB in total size).

I guess my ultimate question is this: Is it fast enough that you’re fine with it, or do you think we need more work in terms of page response times?

We have plans to upgrade our infrastructure as the site resource demands grow, but I want to make sure that you guys and gals are fine with the speed right now.

I’m also working on our servers to make sure that we can squeeze out every single performance improvement that we can (which takes a lot of time and testing).

My main desire here is that you all are experiencing the site without being annoyed that the pages take extraordinarily too long to load. If you feel this way, I encourage you to speak up and let us know, here in the comments or by contacting us directly.

I know I am one person, but it didn’t bother me. I’ve come to expect sites that have a lot of images to load a little slower. In general I haven’t really noticed slowness in the site overall. But again that’s just me.

Of course these are all beautiful, but are they really art? Do they have any real underlying meaning beneath their appealing aesthetic? I wouldnt say they did. Note the use of moleskine notebooks – byword for the pretentious (although I do use a lined one myself to record my homework) white middle class aspiring to creativity.

Are these really sketches or full blown illustrations?…Yes they are great, but to me sketches are for practice, observations, and ideas….most of these look like complete illustrations captured in a sketchbook as a medium. I hope this not sound like a bummer post, but I really what to see some sketches….some real raw capture the moment of thought kinda stuff… there are several in this post that do look like that ~ Joshua Philippe, Taylor White, and a few more….

You see, it is not pointless to dream great dreams. This is “Modern”. Protocol say YES… No… Tron. The Ghost in the Machine. A prophecy of Evil.
Just make sense of it! Kind of crazy. To the Batmobile! Gotham Knight protocol.
So happy to choose…

Definitely reminds me that my perfectionist personality is unnecessary to make beautiful work- after a long blue period I feel like I can pick my markers back up and get back to it. Everything here has an underlying meaning, and it is incredibly inspiring. Thank you for the amazing collection. C:

VERY INTERESING POSTINGS ; I LIKED IT VERY MUCH AND MY SISTER IS VERY MUCH INTERESTED IN DRAWINGS SO, I HAVE SHOWN THIS DRAWINGS SHE WAS VERY EXCITED AND STARTED DRAWING AND SHE HAS DRAWN MORE THAN 10 DRAWINGS WITH YOUR INSPIRATION ; THANKYOU SO MUCH.

Well I’m not easily inspired by others art work but Allen Suttons really inspired me for some reason. I mostly draw people or cartoons or sometimes my own little world that takes a while to understand. And it has just inspired me… I’ve been stuck on things to draw lately but know it all comes to me thanks c: